


God Is Not in the Alley

by damalur



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), DCU
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has faith that there will always, always be a man in the dark with a gun, and he has faith that every night he will put on his armor and go into the dark and take that gun away from that man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	God Is Not in the Alley

**Author's Note:**

> Batman gen, vaguely Nolanverse, references to the comics. Rated R for mentions of violence. Written prior to the release of TDK.

Let’s talk about God.

This is Bruce Wayne.  Bruce is seven years old.  Bruce likes The Gray Ghost and playing Clue and taking things apart.  His best friends are Tommy Elliot and Rachel Dawes.  His parents are Thomas and Martha Wayne.  Every Sunday Thomas and Martha Wayne go to church, and Bruce goes with them.  Bruce doesn’t think his Sunday school teacher likes him very much because he asks too many questions.  

When he is seven years old, Bruce falls down a well.  He falls endlessly, into a cave where the dark is all-encompassing and the bats are his nightmares given form.  God is not in the cave.  God does not save Bruce.

Thomas Wayne does.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about nightmares.

This is Bruce.  Bruce is eight years old.  He likes action and adventure and swashbuckling!  He wants to go see a Zorro movie that’s playing at the Gotham 18, but his mother says they’ll go some other time.  Tonight they have opera tickets.  Bruce hasn’t been to the opera before.  He doesn’t like getting dressed up, but he’s excited to go on what his mother calls an Outing.

Two hours later, and Bruce is kneeling in an alley.  In the alley is blood, draining across the asphalt and soaking through the knees of Bruce’s good trousers.  The blood is Bruce’s father’s blood and Bruce’s mother’s blood and so, in a very real way, Bruce’s blood.  In the alley are pearls, round and pale and fanned out across the ground.  In the alley are the bodies of Thomas and Martha Wayne, slumped and twisted grotesquely, like something out of a movie.  And in the alley is Bruce Wayne, age eight, heir to the Wayne fortune, prince of Gotham and recent orphan, who does not cry.

God is not in the alley.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about science.

This is Bruce.  Bruce is fifteen years old.  Bruce’s teachers talk about him using words like “precocious” and “driven.”  Bruce doesn’t pay much attention to his teachers.  They don’t have much to teach him anymore.  Soon he’ll find better teachers, and the old ones will say he’s just flaunting his money.  Bruce doesn’t mind.

Bruce spends most of his time in the lab.  He’s not entirely certain why it’s so important for him to do so; an idea flits around his mind, but it’s only a half-formed idea, still hiding in the dark areas of his brain.  He nurtures the idea, lets it grow in the shadows.  In the meantime he pays attention to his chemicals and his test tubes.  God is not in the lab.  God does not make an acid react with a base in a certain way.  The acid reacts with the base because of the structures of certain molecules and how those molecules interact with other molecules.  It is all very predictable, regulated by precise laws.  Bruce can have faith in this, because previous experience proves that his faith will be rewarded.

Bruce doesn’t have faith without proof.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about cowardice.

This is Bruce.  Bruce is twenty years old.  Many people dismiss Bruce with the label “angry youth” and think about him no further.  This is an inaccurate conclusion.  Bruce is not angry in the way his peers are angry.  Bruce’s anger is dark and focused and the end result of an empty space in his chest.  At a surface level Bruce’s anger might seem irrational and young.  At the surface.

Bruce has a gun and a plan.  Not much of a plan, given, because even if his anger is old he is still a twenty-year-old male with a gun.  His parents would be ashamed.  Alfred would be ashamed.  If Bruce could think through the cold roar in his veins, he would be ashamed too.

Instead, he looks down the hallway at the man who murdered his parents, the gun gripped loosely in his right hand.  He looks down the hallway, and before he can use the gun, somebody else shoots Joe Chill.  Shoots him dead, in the broad daylight, in front of a dozen witnesses.

God may not exist in Bruce, but He certainly doesn’t exist in guns and bullets and murder by daylight.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about journeys.

This is Bruce.  Bruce is twenty-five years old.  Bruce is one of the richest men in the entire world.  He has stocks and bonds and accounts and investments and companies and cash.  He also has spent the past half-decade with nothing to his name but the clothes on his back.  His most prized possession is his coat; it is warmth in the cold, a pillow at night, a shield for his identity, and a place to hide any food he steals.  He steals to eat, this rich man, this rich man with shit on his boots and dirt on his face and darting criminal eyes.  There is no God in the places Bruce goes, except for the necessity of hunger and the greed of necessity.

Part of Bruce’s journey is about learning what it is to be hungry, to steal, to languish in a prison and conspire against his fellow men.  Part of Bruce’s journey is about burning away the nonessential parts of his personality; his compassion hardens, his ideals tarnish, the last scraps of his naivety are shredded away.  

Part of Bruce’s journey is about being lost.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about fear.

This is Batman.  Batman is twenty years old.  Batman once went by the name Bruce Wayne, but now the man who uses the name Bruce Wayne is just a mask, a tool, a body that should have died twenty years ago.  In naming himself Batman has defined his own existence

People are afraid of Batman.  Everybody is afraid of Batman, except Alfred and maybe Jim Gordon.  Fear is an acceptable reaction—even a useful one.  

Bruce thought to rid himself of fear, to cut it away, by becoming what he feared himself.  Lying in an alley, with the Scarecrow’s toxin racing through his veins, he wonders if that’s possible.  The toxin races through his veins and his nerves sing and his eyes stutter and his heart leaps.  This must be vertigo.  Bruce has never felt like this before, never allowed himself to feel like this before.  It’s OUT OF CONTROL and rasps against all the hurting places in Bruce’s soul.

God is not in the alley.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about wealth.

This is Bruce Wayne.  Bruce Wayne is twenty-eight years old.  Bruce is just a mask, a tool, for a creature that stalks the night and is the night and chases the night away.  Bruce is a good mask, though; he smiles and smiles and plays the fool, and nobody can doubt the sincerity of his shallowness.

Bruce is in a room with dazzling people, sparkling people, scintillating people, people who drip diamonds and bathe in gold and eat only ambrosia and drink only nectar.  These people think they are gods, but God is not in this room.  God is not in these empty people who smile and laugh and pass by on the other side of the road, and God is not in Bruce Wayne, who is the emptiest of them all.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about opposites.

This is Batman.  Batman is twenty-one years old.  Batman is two years old.  Batman is strong and swift and smart and helpless.  

He races along a rooftop, and the shots ring out loud, and the sound ricochets from one building to the next.  By the time Batman reaches the alley, it is too late.  The woman is on the ground, neck snapped, legs spread, slumped and twisted and leaking on the asphalt.  The Joker is standing over her, zipping up his purple pants, manic and grinning.  In the alley are a dead woman and an insane creature.  Batman wishes the scene were a foreign one, a strange one, but this scene and a hundred like it and a thousand others different but equally horrific haunt the dark corners of his mind.  If God is not in Batman, then Batman cannot imagine what writhing thing does or does not make its home in the Joker’s soul.

God is not in the alley.  Batman doesn’t bother looking.

* * *

  
Let’s talk about faith.

This is Batman.  Batman is twenty-two and three and thirty, thirty-one, thirty-five, forty.  Sometimes Batman goes by the name Bruce Wayne.  Sometimes Bruce Wayne goes by the name Batman.  Batman is a detective, a hero, a vigilante, a knight, who saves and damns with blind eyes.  Batman is a symbol.  Bruce Wayne is a mask.  The man who is both makes his life in the spaces between, and the cave where he lives is where he’s most and least himself.

Batman has faith.  He has faith that his grapple gun will function as long as he takes care of it.  He has faith that Alfred will patch his bullet holes.  He has faith that there will always, always be a man in the dark with a gun, and he has faith that every night he will put on his armor and go into the dark and take that gun away from that man.  

God is not in the cave, but Bruce is—

And for now, that’s enough.


End file.
